aleph man page

Run the Aleph typesetter on file, usually creating file.dvi. If the file argument has no extension, ".tex" will be appended to it. Instead of a filename, a set of Aleph commands can be given, the first of which must start with a backslash. With a &format argument Aleph uses a different set of precompiled commands, contained in format.fmt; it is usually better to use the -fmtformat option instead.

Aleph is a version of the TeX program modified for multilingual typesetting. It uses Unicode, and has additional primitives for (among other things) bidirectional typesetting.

Aleph's command line options are similar to those of TeX.

Aleph is no longer being actively developed; see LuaTeX for current activity.

See the Kpathsearch library documentation (the `Path specifications' node) for precise details of how the environment variables are used. The kpsewhich utility can be used to query the values of the variables.

One caveat: In most Aleph formats, you cannot use ~ in a filename you give directly to Aleph, because ~ is an active character, and hence is expanded, not taken as part of the filename. Other programs, such as Metafont, do not have this problem.

Normally, Aleph puts its output files in the current directory. If any output file cannot be opened there, it tries to open it in the directory specified in the environment variable TEXMFOUTPUT. There is no default value for that variable. For example, if you say tex paper and the current directory is not writable, if TEXMFOUTPUT has the value /tmp, Aleph attempts to create /tmp/paper.log (and /tmp/paper.dvi, if any output is produced.) TEXMFOUTPUT is also checked for input files, as TeX often generates files that need to be subsequently read; for input, no suffixes (such as “.tex”) are added by default, the input name is simply checked as given.

Search path for \input and \openin files. This should start with “.”, so that user files are found before system files. An empty path component will be replaced with the paths defined in the texmf.cnf file. For example, set TEXINPUTS to ".:/home/user/tex:" to prepend the current direcory and “/home/user/tex” to the standard search path.

This version of Aleph implements a number of optional extensions. In fact, many of these extensions conflict to a greater or lesser extent with the definition of Aleph. When such extensions are enabled, the banner printed when Aleph starts is changed to print Alephk instead of Aleph.

This version of Aleph fails to trap arithmetic overflow when dimensions are added or subtracted. Cases where this occurs are rare, but when it does the generated DVI file will be invalid.